Wednesday, August 20, 2014

I tried to teach students how to read fiction, especially short
stories, at California State University, Long Beach for forty years. Every time
I went into the classroom, I had read the assignment for the day at least four
times—once straight through to orient myself to the characters, plot, and
style; the second time highlighting those passages that seemed to me to be more
than verisimilitude, e.g. motifs that were repeated, passages that seemed to
emphasize theme, allusions to other works, passages that puzzled me, etc.; the
third time making annotations in the margins about connections and emerging
patterns. Finally, I would go back
through the story a fourth time, typing up my notes, e.g. quotations,
annotations, connections, developments.

The following comments on "Hateship, Friendship" are
an example of those notes—notes that would sometimes later lead to the
development of my "reading" of the story into an essay. I have
developed these notes in preparation for my essay on five stories in the Hateship volume.

Since, this "reading" represents a fourth time through the story, what understanding I
have of the early events are conditioned by my knowledge of the later events. I
already have in mind the events as they occur in time; my task now is to
determine what kind of meaningful pattern they make. The most basic patterning
device in a story is, of course, repetition of motifs that create a "figure
in the carpet."

The story opens with a variation of the "once upon a time
there was a woman" fable device : "Years ago, before the trains stopped
running on so many of the branch lines, a woman with a high, freckled forehead
and a frizz of reddish hair came into the railway station and inquired about
shipping furniture." There is a bit
of the stylized grotesque about the woman's physical appearance. I am prepared
for a fable.

The story establishes its central theme of "great
expectations" (repeated throughout) at the beginning with the introduction
of this unnamed woman planning for the future because she expects certain
important things are going to happen, although the reader does not know what
those expectations are. She seems so certain about the future, when the ticket
agent asks if someone is coming to meet her, she does not hesitate, but says
"Yes," although she has no knowledge that this is true. I know this
is going to be an important theme in the story, for I know that the story ends
with the young woman Edith translating the following Latin passage from
Horace's ode "Carpe Diem": "You must not ask, it is forbidden
for us to know what fate has in store for me, or for you."

In the second scene, when the woman, who is now given the
name Johanna, goes to a dress shop to buy her wedding dress, she thinks that
when she was younger, she could not have
contemplated such "expectations," could not have had the
"preposterous hope of transformation, and bliss." Thus, the story
begins with what was once traditionally the most important expectation a fair
young maiden could have—marriage.
However, this woman is neither young (just under forty) nor fair--"No
beauty queen, ever." She reminds
the agent of a "plain-clothes nun" he had once seen on television. But there is nothing mild nor gentle nor
pious about this woman The first
description we have of her is that her "teeth are crowded together in the
front of her mouth, as if they were ready for an argument." (another grotesque
image—kind of like Maria in Joyce's "Clay")

Johanna has come to the shop prepared, even having
"rehearsed" her request for the green dress in the window; she has
worn clean underwear and put fresh talcum powder under her arms. However, she
has no illusions about herself, calling herself a "sow's ear"
regardless of the "silk purse" dress she tries on.

The sales woman identifies with Johanna, creates a
"bond" with her, and has her try on a different dress that does not
make her look as she has been "stuck into the garment for a joke."
Since we know that the crucial events of the story are created by a
"joke" that two young woman play on Johanna, we have here the first
intimation of the theme of a joke that has motivated Johanna's expectations; we
learn that it is indeed a "great expectation" when she tells the
woman, "It'll likely be what I get married in."

Although Johanna seems absolutely "sure" when she
says she will only get married once, she recalls that marriage had not been
mentioned, even in the "last letter." She regrets that she has
revealed to this woman "what she was counting on." (This is another intimation of the game that
gives the story its title, a children's counting game about the inevitable
movement toward marriage. Another
allusion to expectation.)

Another fable/fairy tale allusion occurs when the sales
clerk refers to the Western Fair and "she could have been saying 'the
Castle Ball.'" Even the minor
detail of the woman giving the package ribbon a "wicked snip"
suggests a fairy tale motif.

The sales woman's lament, "Ah, well. Maybe the man in
the moon will walk in here and fall in love with me and then I'll be all
set!" could be a simple bit of verisimilitude, characterizing a minor
character, but since this is a short story the repetition of this motif makes
us expect that this is indeed a story about expectation, hopes for what might
happen. It's the classic fairy tale love story motif of "someday my prince
will come."

We now get the background of Mr. McCauley, for whom Johanna works
as a housekeeper, an elderly man, who walks about with his hands behind his
back like a "kind landlord inspecting his property or a preacher happy to
observe his flock." (another fable/fairytale motif). We are also
introduced to Sabitha, his granddaughter, for whom Johanna was the closest
thing to a mother since her mother, Marcelle, died (the stepmother motif—not wicked,
but certainly not likeable) We also meet Edith, the daughter of the shoe repair
man, Sabetha's great friend.

Now we are introduced to the important motif of letters, as
we read Johanna's letter saying she is sending a (yet unnamed) man his
furniture, adding that she is also coming with it to "be of help" to
him. This is the first letter she has sent directly to him, having sent earlier
ones via Sabitha's letter to her father (now given the name Ken Boudreau).
Gradually, we learn that Boudreau is Mr. McCauley's son-in-law and that
McCauley has loaned Boudreau money in the past.
All this gradual revelation of information creates an illusion of plot
mystery. Alice Munro has noted that this
story depends more on plot than many of her stories. However, since this is a short story, in
spite of its novella length, it is not what will happen that interests us, but
rather what the pattern of those events actually mean about human experience.

We now get the background, via Mr. McCauley's recollection
of the past, of Sabitha's dead mother, Marcelle, who was always sneaking out of
the house to run around with carloads of boys. "The house was full of a
feeling of callus desertion, of deceit."

The next section of the story focuses on Mr. McCauley, who
goes about the town telling anyone who will listen about his being wronged by
his son-in-law conniving with his housekeeper who has stolen furniture and gone
west with it. This introduces the
"Ancient Mariner" motif of the man who stops the wedding guest and
compels him to listen to his misfortune.

It also introduces Herman Schultz, the father of Edith, who
creates the plot to "catch" Johanna. Herman's shoe shop is like a
cave and McCauley who has not reflected on it before now sees Schultz's whole
life in the cave. "He wished to express sympathy or admiration or
something more that he didn't understand." (Any time I run across
something that a character tries to understand but fails, it strikes me as
something important, for short stories are often about mysteries.)

This also introduces Edith, a "childishly thin
"girl who slides in and out of the house when she came to visit Sabitha.
"You never got a good look at her face." (Edith is thus introduced as
a mysterious figure who slides in with no definite identity) The introduction
of Edith is important. Now that Sabitha
has gone, Edith has "reverted to being the person she had been before Sabitha
came here. Old for her age, diligent, and critical." She is getting past
what is called "silliness" with Sabitha (We do not know what this is
yet). But when she thinks about Johanna
going out west, which she has heard from old Mr. McCauley, "she felt a
chill from her past, an invasive alarm. She tried to bang a lid down on that,
but it wouldn't stay."

It seems appropriate that she
would be reading a Dickens' novel, David
Copperfield, for Great Expectations
would have been too obvious). She
identifies with David and dramatizes her own situation, feeling she might has
well have been an orphan like him "because she would probably have to run
away, go into hiding, fend for herself, when the truth became known and her
past shut off her future." (This is
the expectation motif again—fear that the past will condition the future). She
is now worrying that her past trick on Johanna will affect her future.)

The whole joke began when Sabitha tells
her on the way to school that she has to send a letter to her father. The two
girls create a sort of secret bond, talking in nonsense language or walking
with their eyes closed—mostly ideas of Edith.
Sabitha's only idea is the child hood game of predicting the future by
playing the Hateship, friendship game, in which you write down your name and a
boy's name and then strike out all the letters that appear in both names. Then you tick off the remaining letters on
our fingers, saying "hateship, friendship, courtship, loveship, marriage
until you get the verdict of what would happen to you and that boy, sort of
like the "He loves me, he loves me not" game with daisy petals. (I
did the game using my name and my wife's name.
The result was "marriage.")

The game or joke on Johanna begins
when she writes to Boudreau to thank him for taking her to the Fair with the
girls and giving him the background of her uneventful life. The girls open it and read it and laugh about
it, with Edith mocking it, as if it were from a sentimental Victorian novel.
When Boudreau writes back to Sabitha and makes no mention of Johanna, Edith
decides she and Sabitha will write for hi. While Sabitha is silly in her
suggestions, Edith says she is going to be serious. Her letter to Johanna is
indeed typical of melodrama and fairy tale, Boudreau supposedly lamenting that
he has no friend, but that now Johanna is his friend. Thus begins a
correspondence of letters between Johanna and Boudreau, both of which are
written by Edith

The next section of the story is
about Sabitha's return from visiting her cousins and the changes that have
taken place in her. She is plumper and
now has breasts, which Edith notices and thinks they seem to indicate a
"completely unearned and unfair advantage." Sabitha tells Edith about
her visit with her cousins, about how they played games in which they pull down
a girls' pajama bottoms to show if she had hair. They told stories about girls at boarding
school who did things with hairbrush handles, and how once a couple of cousins
put on a show in which one girl gets on top of the other and pretends to be the
boy, and they groan and carry on.

Sabitha tells how her Uncle
Clark's sister and her husband game to visit on their honeymoon and he was seen
to put his hand inside her swimsuit. Sabitha says they were at it day and
night, saying "People can't help it when they're in love like that."
She says one of her cousins had already done it with a boy and then she puts a
pillow between her legs and says, "Feels so nice."

Edith knows about these "Pleasurable
agonies" but once when she went to sleep with a blanket between her legs,
her mother tells her about a girl who did such things and had to be operated on
for the problem. (Clitorectomies were sometimes performed in the nineteenth
century because it was felt that girls should not have pleasurable sexual
feelings—certainly none self-induced).

Later when they write another
letter, Sabitha suggests her father should say he imagines Johanna reading his
letters in bed with her nightgown on and that he would crush her in his arms and
"suck on your titties." Edith does not write this, but does end the
letter with Boudreau saying he imagines her reading his letter in bed with her
nightgown on and crushing her in his arms. As a result of this letter, Johanna
decides to send the furniture and go West with it. All this girlhood initiation into the
mysteries of sex seems to play a role in Edith's attitude, for her thoughts
about her future are becoming increasingly important in the story. However, the key effect of the sexual
references is that Johanna makes a crucial decision to go to Boudreau after
reading Edith's letter (supposedly from him) about wants to crush her in his
arms. Female romantic/sexual notions are
an important part of the story.

The story now shifts to Johanna
arriving at Boudreau's hotel, and appropriately it is painted blue, a reference
to Stephen Crane's "The Blue Hotel" in which fantasy leads to a
reality, albeit in a tragic way, when the Swede in that story imagines he is
going to get killed and then acts in such a way as to make that happen. It is a story of a game becoming a reality,
when fantasy becomes fate.

It is an interesting shift that
Johanna, who has come to Boudreau's home because of a romantic fantasy, as soon
as she sees he is ill and that his life is in disarray and that he needs her,
she shifts from romance to reality immediately--checking the color of his
phlegm, wiping her hands on her new brown dress, changing into old clothes from
her suitcase, seeing him as being like a "delicate, stricken boy."
Checking her bankbook, Boudreau is impressed enough to let her take care of
him. We now get his background financial problems and his realization that
Johanna is a solution to his problems. She takes control, makes decisions, and
begins using the plural first person pronoun, seeing them as a couple. All this is based not on romantic illusions,
but on pure practicality.

Because she decides never to
mention the letters in which she thinks he had "laid himself open to
her," neither one of them ever know how this has come about. She thinks
there is nothing in him that she cannot handle and is taken up with all the
commotion of this relationship, all this "busy love."

The story might well have ended
with this phrase, but since the story has to do with expectation and making
things happen, the future must be projected in some way that relates to Edith's
concern for the future. This takes place when ;Mr. McCauley dies two years
later and the death notice in the paper says that he is survived by his granddaughter
Sabitha, his son-in-law Ken Boudreau, and Mr. Boudreau's wife, Johanna and
their infant son Omar..

The story ends with Edith, who is
no longer afraid of being found out, although she does not know why she has not
been found out. Then there is this judgment by the narrator/storyteller:

"And in a
way, it seemed only proper that the antics of her former self should not be
connected with her present self—let alone with the real self that she expected
would take over once she got out of this town and away from all the people who
thought they knew her. It was the whole
twist of consequence that dismayed her—it seemed fantastical, but dull. As if
it was an inept joke or clumsy sort of warning, trying to get its hooks into
her. For where, on the list of things
she planned to achieve in her lie, was there any mention of her being
responsible for the existence on earth of a person named Omar?"

The last line of the story is
Edith's translation of the first line of Horace's famous ode "Carpe Diem: "You
must not ask, it is forbidden for us to know what fate has in store for me, or
for you."

I am not going to try to pull
these ideas together and write an analysis of this story until I have given the
other four stories the same kind of fairly thorough reading. Next week, I will "read" "Floating
Bridge."

Reality of Artifice

New Short Story Theories

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About Me

Born and raised in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky. Received B.A. from Morehead State University in 1963; M.A. from Ohio University in 1964; Ph.D. from Ohio University in 1966. Taught at California State University, Long Beach from 1967 to 2007. Retired and currently writing and blogging.

Dubliners Centenial

One hundred years ago, the great collection of stories Dubliners by James Joyce appeared. If you are interested in my comments on that collection, see my posts in April 2012 when the book was featured in Dublin's "One City, One Book."